Posted!

Join the Conversation

Comments

Welcome to our new and improved comments, which are for subscribers only.
This is a test to see whether we can improve the experience for you.
You do not need a Facebook profile to participate.

You will need to register before adding a comment.
Typed comments will be lost if you are not logged in.

Please be polite.
It's OK to disagree with someone's ideas, but personal attacks, insults, threats, hate speech, advocating violence and other violations can result in a ban.
If you see comments in violation of our community guidelines, please report them.

By the time "Native Gardens" roars toward its conclusion, there are few hot buttons left to push. The two couples fighting over property rights to a 2-foot strip of back yard have put their trigger fingers all over race, status, gender, politics — even gardening philosophy.

In the near-perfect current production from Gulfshore Playhouse, these historical-district neighbors distill what is wrong with human communication today even before texting and email are factored in. We can be a thin-skinned, self-righteous, entitled species.

And in real life, it can get much uglier than the weed-pitching and stake-pulling antics between the senior squires of the neighborhood, Frank and Virginia Butley, and their upwardly mobile Latinx neighbors, Pablo and Tania Del Valle.

But playwright Karen Zacarías has plumbed this story for its revelatory qualities rather than the ultimate potential of its rages. White society is way too often "blind to our own privilege," to paraphrase Tania's rant at Frank Butley. And the Del Valleses, as the new Latin-heritage couple in this brick-home enclave, are hyper-sensitive to exploitation: They insist on plunking their fence right over the Butleys' prize-aspirant flower garden on competition weekend.

The location of that fence is a metaphor for everything that is building up between the two couples: highly pruned roses and constant insect sprays versus native plants that resemble weeds and their accompanying insect pollinators. Foreign versus "American-born." White wine versus red.

There are volatile additives: Pablo is a new lawyer, hoping to make partner, and in his tunnel vision invites his entire firm to a housewarming without consulting the near-term pregnant Tania. Frank Butley has an intense rivalry with another yard owner —"Very friendly and neighborly, I assure you"— who has wrested the "best garden" title from him for the last three years. There's a lot of delicious dissection available in the relationships between the spouses as well as between the couples.

Kristen Coury, founder and producing artistic director for Gulfshore Playhouse, is directing this one, and she gets her actors to freight every sentence with the exact right level of potential offense. When Tania pronounces the Butleys' garden as "very European," the disapproval drifts like smoke among the ostensibly neutral words.

And there could 10 ways to say, "I thought I detected a Spanish accent" other than with air of finality Virginia loads into it. (Tania actually is from New Mexico and barely knows Spanish.)

Coury's job is made easier with the professional in this production. Maureen Silliman (Virginia Butley) and William Parry, both Gulfshore veterans, are life partners outside the theater as well as in it, but their values here are beautifully wed to the characters' personalities: Virginia is the warrior, the voice of reason until battle time. Frank is the couple's emotional barometer, accelerating from jovial to blustering in seconds; he's wired with internal explosives.

Elizabeth Ramos plays a grounded Tania who has to be pushed hard to come loose from her moorings. She also commands a great sense of comic timing, most hilariously used when she attempts, with that beach ball of a baby inside her, to retrieve a rake that has fallen to the ground. And Armando Acevedo creates a convincing Chilean in his Pablo, slightly bewildered at American thought processes and intensely — and unfortunately — straightforward.

The set is its own player in this story, with its high-contrast pair of back yards. Playhouse Scenic Designer David L. Arsenault has created a Better Homes and Gardens milieu for the Butleys, next to the Addams Family yard that was left to the Del Valleses. Jimmy Lawlor's lighting design creates sumptuous twilights and John Kiselica's sound design offers a retinue mature neighborhood sounds, although the birds do occasionally sound as if they're on your shoulder rather than 20 feet up.

Anyone who has suffered a next-door dispute will laugh with gritted teeth occasionally. But the Gulfshore Playhouse production of "Native Gardens" guarantees you'll laugh — and learn at the same time.

Harriet Howard Heithaus covers arts and entertainment for the Naples Daily News/naplesnews.com. Reach her at 239-213-6091.